The result has been surprisingly successful. In many localities, and in fact in nearly all localities in the East, the most intolerant spirit has been manifested by the most prominent persons in the community, who had never taken the pains to examine the subject on which they so violently and fanatically expressed themselves. To people of any acquaintance with the literature, the history, and the science of money, it has seemed most marvellous that business men of large affairs, of much general information, and of excellent natural abilities, should be content to remain absolutely ignorant of fundamental monetary principles and the overwhelmingly attested lessons of past experience. It is infinitely pitiful to see men of affairs led away in so-called "business men's sound-money associations" and other similar movements, when a knowledge of the conditions on which their welfare depends would send them in an exactly opposite direction. Why? Because business men are men who do business, or at any rate who want to do business; and all legitimate business consists in the performance of some appropriate function in connection with the production or the exchange of commodities. It is apparent to even the dullest apprehension that whatever prevents or discourages production is destructive of business, and that a money system which provides a measuring unit that constantly demands, as an equivalent, an increasing quantity of everything produced, is the greatest burden on production that could possibly be devised. But it is precisely this kind of a unit that the gold standard furnishes. No one economic fact is so conclusively established and so generally conceded as that of the progressive fall of average prices throughout the gold-standard world during the last twenty-four years. This fall amounts to almost fifty per cent, and indeed, in respect to the great staple products of the country, exceeds fifty per cent; so that, to state the same fact in its converse, the purchasing power of gold has increased since 1873 one hundred per cent. The significance of this awful fact is deftly obscured behind the deceptive and specious plea for "a dollar of the greatest purchasing power." This is one of those artful expressions that are used by the advocates of the gold standard as a kind of thought-deterrent. It seems so obvious, at the first suggestion, that the best dollar is the dollar that will buy the most, that it is hard for a man to get even a hearing who asserts that, on the contrary, such a dollar is the very worst dollar conceivable. But a moment's reflection will satisfy any sane mind that such is the case. The demonstration is so simple that one feels like apologizing for making it. Yet it is in respect to principles just as plain as this one that people are constantly allowing themselves to be taken in by the supporters of the single standard.